Thursday, 19 September 2013

Following yesterday's post about serialising some of John Cook's rebuttal pieces, the comments have persuaded me that I should continue putting them up in the shooting gallery.

But before I do, some other points and a request:

1. First, I need to make it clear that the comments I received privately were certainly not aimed at censoring Cook. But the depth of feeling in them clearly signalled that something has gone wrong in the academic debate on climate change.

2. As he himself says, Cook himself is not a climate scientist - his specialism is physics - and his site was set up pro bono by his lights as a convinced global warmist. Further, he says he "has no affiliations with any organisations or political groups." So he is not to be accused of having stymied anyone's career in climate science, or taking some rich man's shilling. When one glances around the internet he does seem to polarise (that wasnt intended as a pun) the participants, because of his (as some see it) excessive assertiveness; but one has to remember that Skeptical Science is intended for the public and so oversimplification is bound to be a hazard.

What gave me pause was the obvious - and surprising to me - strength of sentiment provoked by Cook, who appears to stand as a symbol of the triumphalism of the pro-warmist camp generally. And even in the comments to my related post yesterday, there are mutual insults and imputations of improper motive and so on. There is a level of tension that makes liberal suspension of judgement and bilateral respect very hard to sustain, and so I wondered whether it was worthwhile airing the discussion if all it achieved was to see the air thick with brickbats - "hooligan's confetti".

But this has led to another issue: what is causing this level of acrimony? There is smoke drifting over the hedge, and I'd like to see where the fire is.

I don't think it's just to do with disagreements over the truth. It's something to do with vested interests of various kinds, that's clear enough, and I'll be glad if anyone is willing to get down to specifics rather than generally tarring the other side as mercenary scoundrels.

That's my first request: specifics on conscious bias. While keeping an eye on libel laws, can anybody really show that soemone has sold their integrity, instead of simply being funded for an opinion they had anyway?

And my second is about bullying and skulduggery. What evidence (if any) is there that people on either side have been leaned on or otherwise unfairly treated for not toeing the line? Is there any case where fervent revolutionaries or cold reactionaries have gone too far, and (in career terms) employed Stalin's maxim "no man, no problem"?

If you feel you can help, please contact me in confidence at wved@ymail.com. It will be very useful in getting the background - or the underlay - to this most contentious subject.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Wednesday, 18 September 2013

On Monday, I commented on David Rose's piece in previous day's Mail on Sunday. His series has been tagged "The Great Green Con" and his contrarianism (with which I have no issue in principle, being awkward myself) has been expressed in a provocative style that may help sell newspapers but doesn't do much for the spirit of liberal debate. In fact Rose seems to go so far out of his way to rile that I mistakenly thought he might be Johann Hari, who did at one time use the name "David Rose"; I am sorry for the error, but I have little trust in newpapers any more and believe some of them capable of taking a black sheep back into the fold if it helps boost circulation. My bad, as the Americans say.

Rose's piece seized on the increase in Arctic ice cover as some sort of touchstone proof that the global warmists were wrong. So I cast about for some alternative explanation for this seemingly awkward fact. And came across a piece written by an Australian academic called John Cook, who described a plausible mechanism whereby ice at the other end of the world might be increasing as a result of global warming. He kindly agreed to let me republish here, and to use other material if I wished - and so I planned a series of his debunk-the-debunker pieces to run for a month or so, with the idea that it would stimulate and inform debate.

I didn't realize that I had gone pogo-sticking into a minefield.

Having left college nearly forty years ago, and only as a student, I had forgotten what I'd heard about how sharp academic controversy and rivalry can be. At Oxford, votes in the election of the University's Chancellor can be checked against the name of the voter, and careers have (it seems) come to a screeching, permanent halt just for backing the wrong candidate. I supported a friend in the last vote and found out from Who's Who that another candidate, Lord Blake, was also head of the Electoral Reform Society, which (I think) is in favour of secret ballots; my friend told me that when he was going round radio stations on the stump they treated him as an entertaining joke until he raised this point, and then he could hear the producer screaming "Cut!" into the interviewer's headphones.

Now it seems that climate change is an issue that can scarcely be discussed at all. Adherents on either side overstate their case and denigrate the opposition - deplorably like some of the politicians that infest our Mother of Parliaments. It was Andrew Neather who revealed that Labour was happy to encourage immigration partly because it would "rub the Right's nose in diversity" (though the implication of that metaphor is quite unpleasant, when you come to consider it).

Anyhow, it may well be that careers in science have also been blighted by backing the wrong candidate (would Richard Dawkins be fair to a Christian graduate student under his tutelage, I wonder; perhaps he would). And there's money in grants and lobbying to be had on both sides, too.

So the odium theologicum rages strong in this field. Alerted by very unhappy comment about John Cook, I looked for evidence that he is considered extremist or over-eager in his advocacy. His site (Skeptical Science) is certainly assertive, just as Rose's articles are, and really I've been brought up to think that science is always tentative and provisional. And so like Rose (who I think is not himself a scientist, though he has chosen a scientific subject) he invites debunkers.

Which is what I was hoping for. A backs global warming, B rejects the theory, C (Cook) tries to debunk the contrarian, D (I would hope) picks holes in the debunking.

It seems it's not quite like that. The temperature of the debate is melting everyone's cool. At a milder level, the site WattsUpWithThat features a number of articles about Cook's claims, including a recent dissection of his assertion that the overwelming majority of scientists believe in global warming; on the same issue, two other writers leap to his defence in The Guardian.

But it can get much, much worse than that. Some of the comments on The Guardian's website, reacting to David Rose, are simply psychotic. There's a lot more mental illness around than we realise; people talking with a mask on lose their humanity, it seems.

Well, I had planned a series of Cook's pieces and let people take reasoned and factual pot-shots; but I didn't intend for anyone to be seriously unhappy. I came from a family that was prepared to argue about everything - Mother voted Labour, Father Conservative (why did they both vote, I wondered) - but retained that sense that anyone can be wrong about anything. We kicked the ball around in the air, but never at anyone's head.

As far as climate goes, either it will stay much the same for the rest of human history, or get warmer, or colder (either of which could have serious consequences for us); the truth matters, even though we may not be able to predict it, and if we are helping make the environment more dangerous, then we should do something about it - if we can; but maybe we're not, and we can't, or shouldn't. But surely honest and mutually respectful debate (from all sides) has the best chance of discovering something like the truth, and helping us make decisions that are less wrong.

You'll see from the Energy and Climate page that the sidebar has links to both camps. But should I continue to print Cook's pieces here on this main page, if all it does is increase heat without light? I'm sorry if that's all it's done.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment.
Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.